Accelerating and optimizing everyday business tasks is becoming a priority in today’s modern workplace. Whether it’s onboarding, expense filing, or countless other processes running the business, it’s easy to discover the potential that business process automation offers those organizations looking to improve the way they work.
As new technology emerges, organizations have access to an increasingly diverse array of tools that can automate more and more tasks, lightening their everyday workloads.
However, the potential for real progress lies not in simply automating tasks, but in creating a culture of process excellence. For the first time, organizations have access to technology that will allow them to improve every aspect of a business process and create end-to-end process automation solutions.
To truly optimize your processes and get the maximum value from your employees, you need an entirely integrated business automation journey. Here are three main steps that can help to power your efforts.
Step 1: Map
Process mapping can help your organization to better understand its business processes. By assembling and visually presenting vital information about your business workflows, you can gain insights into their function and purpose.
Process mapping makes it easier to see who is in control of these processes, who they involve, where bottlenecks are developing, and most importantly, where improvements can be made.
For example, consider an IT manager who’s involved in a common workplace process like employee onboarding. They need to clearly see the tasks for which they’re responsible, like provisioning IT licenses and configuring access permissions.
IT also needs to see that sign-off from HR or the employee’s new manager is required before they can begin their tasks. They need to know to divert the workflow back to HR once their tasks are completed so that the appropriate paperwork and records can be compiled.
It’s vital that everybody in an organization is aware of what their own tasks are within a process, how these relate to everyone else’s, and which tasks depend on the successful completion of others.
A process map is the simplest and most efficient way of presenting this information so it can be easily interpreted by teams across your company. Process mapping is an important part of accelerating and optimizing common processes because it allows everyone to easily see what tasks need completing, as well as which tasks they need to collaborate on with other users.
From the perspective of a process manager, it enables important decisions about process improvements to be easily made. If you’re looking to begin using workflow automation, process mapping is the best way of identifying where you need to begin.
Step 2: Automate
Once a process map is in place, it becomes much easier to identify the potential for improvements in processes. This is where automation comes into play. By using automated workflow technology, you can automate tasks within the processes you’ve created, allowing tasks to automatically be progressed from user to user, according to the established workflow.
Next, you can work towards more comprehensive automation at every stage of your processes. The more automation you employ, the more you allow your workers to avoid repetitive tasks and free up time to dedicate to higher-value work. Document generation and robotic process automation (RPA) are some of the most common and effective examples of technology that allows businesses to close automation gaps in your workflows.
Here’s a closer look at these valuable automation tools:
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Document generation
Many of the documents that businesses rely on are structurally very similar, such as sales proposals, contracts, or work orders. Often, the only thing that changes between each iteration is personal information, much of which can be sourced automatically from their CRM.
Nintex DocGen® allows such documents to be automatically created once and leveraged continuously, which vastly reduces the time it takes information workers to create them.
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Robotic process automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the most significant developments in automation technology in recent years. Where traditional workflow automation specializes in automatically moving tasks between workers, RPA focuses on completing the tasks itself.
By analyzing users’ everyday tasks, it learns how to complete low-level, repetitive activities within the workflow itself. RPA can rapidly complete activities such as moving data between spreadsheets and systems, and copying and pasting data from one file to another, manipulating spreadsheets, and producing reports.
With RPA, organizations can continually add new automation potential to their existing processes, replacing manual tasks with automated alternatives.
Step 3: Improve
Having established your automated workflows, it’s important to make sure that they keep improving.
As your business grows and adapts, so should the processes you use to manage it. In order to make this maintenance fast and effective, you need fast and detailed insights into the health of automated workflows across your organization. When you analyze, optimize and govern your processes, you can make better decisions about how to improve them.
To make this easier, Nintex Analytics process intelligence tools provide you with fast and actionable insights into the performance of your automated processes. From here, you can easily identify which objectives will allow you to further optimize your automated workflows.
The complete automation journey with Nintex
With the Nintex Process Platform, end-to-end automation can now become a reality for many businesses.
Every time new workflow technology appears, it provides the potential to optimize your everyday tasks. But it’s only when they’re combined into one seamless automation journey that the truly unprecedented potential for automation can be unleashed. This is the automation platform that Nintex provides.
Nintex users also benefit from a range of advanced automation features, including:
- Form generation – for rapidly and accurately collecting information that launches a workflow
- Mobile apps – for accessing forms and workflows on-the-go
- eSignatures – Nintex DocGen works with several eSignature apps to streamline the remote signing of Nintex-generated documents
Each of these technologies is an invaluable link in the chain that makes Nintex the most powerful process automation platform available. With the combined capabilities of the platform, today’s organizations have access to an entire suite of automation potential, to help them truly succeed in their end-to-end automation pursuits.
Explore the benefits of process automation with this interactive tour.
